I am not the man to tell you the Factory Records story. It involves a label that runs into a great deal of success with its flagship band, Joy Division, and even more success with that band’s subsequent rebirth as New Order. The story also involves a lot of booze and drugs and smaller bands getting worked like mules, so it’s a story that rightly leaves a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths. It is rather unfortunately a story that concludes with the sordidly awful band Happy Mondays, who a lot of people back then thought might be the future of music, except that they weren’t the future of music at all: they were a band with exactly one good song to their credit (“Kuff Damm” from the Young, Popular and Sexy compilation; I may have the song title off by an “f” or “m,” about which I could not care much less, as Happy Mondays are so boring that I am getting sleepy just typing up a line or two about the one song they ever recorded that was actually worth getting excited about) and a great liking for a lot of super-dullsville hippie drugs.